


the liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass

by vaec (aosc)



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Assassin's Creed: Rogue, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 05:25:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3162887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/vaec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A storm does not come and go without reaping victims in its wake. It does not go silently without first breaking open the bend of planks making up the hull of a ship. Shay knows this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass

**Author's Note:**

> spoilers for the main storyline of _rogue_ , and a few character deaths in it. proceed with caution, should you not have played it, and on the occasion that you don't want to know what occurs in-game. putting a just in case trigger warning on a character displaying some PTSD-characteristics throughout.

* * *

 

Shay has always been a stray.

 

Picked by the hairs of the neck from the half wreck that has become of his father's ship, scrutinized, where he is bruised and bent, by a redcoat who murmurs to his accompanying officer in perfect posh British to "take care of the boy, nothing good'll come out of him half starved and half frozen." So he is taken to a ragged boarding house in the downtown of New York. He gets patched to the best of the available abilities, a cast slung about his right arm, swollen from the elbow to the wrist. He is wrapped tightly around the forehead, where blood now dribbles into a thick strip of cloth, rather than into his eyelashes, from a cut slashing into his hairline. The soup is good, admittedly, though he burns the tip of his tongue, but the northern seas upon which they've sailed are treacherous, dark as they are, and cold as death come winter, so he is reverently thankful for all of it.

 

It is autumn. October creeping, twisting its steely claws into your very bones. Shay's arm heals, _vital and young as you are, little 'un_ , says the nurse who comes to check upon him one last time before he is allowed to take the cast off. He's wandered the premise for three weeks, not attempted to think of what has happened to the _Fianna_ , to the shards remaining of her crew. Of father.

 

He paces, and during the night, the sea takes him, swallows him down on her wide tongue, and in the spiral of wild squall and oxygen bubbles wasted, he loses sight of the rest of the crew, and sinks. It will take him many a year before the nightmares of the _Fianna's_ wrecking cease. By the time, they are more than ready to be replaced.

 

He is given a set of decently clean clothes. Linen strips hanging off of his shoulders, which have never properly fit on his body, swaying precariously large somewhere above his thin waist. He dresses, and because he has no belongings to collect, he simply waits until the New York-stationed marshal comes to fetch him, gruff, and places him by a rackety small table singing its final tune, opposite a tall, thin London borne officer, who questions him about something he cannot remember properly. _Something out of an opium dream_ , comes to him, much later, that the officer had muttered. 

 

He is seventeen, and bloodied by a set of fists from a Scot who spits a tooth, and grins madly, and charges for him again. Shay is a tangle of limbs already, flailing, too large feet for his sickly legs and their cording muscle, but in a fight, he knows how to see about his flouncing so that he hits more than he receives. And anyway, the dreamless sleep of one coming off of a high of adrenaline, is one he welcomes. Then the ocean does not take him, and somewhere, he reaches out, in the haze of just barely sleep, to feel the warm callouses of his father's hand wrap around his wrist, tangible. So he steps quickly out of the way, and, when his opponent skids to a clumsy stop, he puts a knee in the small of his back, and an elbow in the side of his neck.

 

"By the love of Christ -- "

 

Shay reels. Blinks, harsh, because if there is anything that he has found out about himself in the recent, it is that sometimes, he hears things which are not there, and he sees things, which by the normal order of things would get him institutionalized. He twists, stumbling, to where a mouth in the crowd is beginning to form, opening up from the back of the onlookers. "Liam?" he says, halting, hesitating, something odd burning in his throat and mouth.

 

Liam has grown into himself in ways that Shay has not, and will not do, until he is Liam's age. He is sturdy, chiseled, and streaked with soot as paint to elevate the blue in his eyes, and the white blonde of his stubbled hair. He looks awestruck momentarily, standing just shy of the makeshift ring that Shay and his fighter has made good use of.

 

Then he grins, a shit eating one such as Shay has ever known one, and Shay doesn't think; trips over himself towards Liam's cradle of a body, throwing himself into what is at once a clasp of hands and of arms. Liam's nose settles in the whorl of Shay's hair, and his words tumble. "By the Gods and then some, _Shay_. Jesus -- I thought you _dead_. When the marshal came with news of the Fianna, I -- we feared the worst. _Shay_." He says his name over and over and over as though it is a prayer, a hymn.

 

Shay says nothing, just burrows into the anchor of Liam's embrace. "Aye," he croaks, after some time. "It's been long, brother."

 

* * *

 

"You must _move_ your feet, Shay. Don't just stand about, I'll sooner mistake you for a dummy than I will a student."

 

Hope is leaned against the farthest fence, polishing down the length of her broadsword, keeping one eyebrow elevated as she scrutinizes his moving. By now, Shay knows that also he is sooner to identifying as a practice dummy, than he is an actual capable body, in her eyes. He is but a boy, despite the fact that he has somewhat grown into himself, and that his hair is longer now, a little stubble darkening the length of his jaw. He has known for quite some time, and the thought no longer stings, the mantra _prove yourself_ , rather, circling his skull.

 

"Again," Hope orders, and crosses her ankles.

 

Shay is a little older, and a little more bestowed with actual capability, and yet his feet are not his own, and in practice drills with Hope, he trips himself up, his mind willing somewhere abroad. By the time that he has completed the steps, he is twirling into a ironic bow before her. He looks through fringe up at her stature, grinning, finishing off the move with a flourishing circling movement of a hand. Hope shakes her head, tipping it back to roll her eyes skywards. "There's no hope left in me for your cause, Cormac," she says.

 

Shay straightens, and offers, though perhaps an act that is futile already from its thought, the crook his arm. The sun is setting burning on the razor of the horizon, and he knows that she is finished with him for the afternoon. As it is, and as it always is, she snorts, batting him away with the dirty cloth she then proceeds to sling over her shoulder. "I'd rather not risk my life, thank you," she says, and sheathes her sword, swaying at her hip.

 

"Aw, come now, Hope. Can't a simple man escort you back to the estate?" Shay says, and bats his eyelashes her direction.

 

"Maybe Liam places some ounces of faith in your escorting abilities, as he does in your other abilities, God knows why -- but I'm also his intellectual superior. So no. Move along, Shay, I know that children usually have some excess energy to waste on running about the place, so why don't you do that."

 

When Shay meets Hope for the first time, he is just shy of eighteen, putting on weight by hoisting wood and iron onto construction sites for Liam's count, his brother's extracurricular activities not concerning him, merely weighing in on his workload, which Shay doesn't mind -- he hasn't done this much with his hands, rhythmically, since he were aboard a ship. It takes his mind from wandering, and it makes him stronger -- _it does you well, does it_ , says Liam when he returns early one evening, with two flasks of ale clutched between his fingers, and throws one at Shay. Shay, who is just getting off work in the chilled season, catches it with a numb palm, and bumps their shoulders. "Not as well as it does you escaping it, _Liam_. Tell me now, when'll I get to meet the future Mrs?"

 

Liam flips him the bird. "I told you already, didn't I? It's just another job. So while you're loitering about the worksite in the mornings, I'm out there, in the big bad city, doin' all sorts of unspeakable things."

 

Shay laughs, and thumbs up the sealing on the bottle. "Sure, sure. Ruin me fun, O'Brien, just do it."

 

They go home. To the home that is a tin roof and a hot fireplace, two dingy mattresses. It's still home, and the settling that Shay has felt the deepest in his gut ever since his aunt died, leaving him with a large void in his person, and to his name. They sit around the blackened table that serves as their dining table, and Shay recites his day, and swallows his ale a little too quickly, whilst Liam reclines into his chair, smiling.

 

It knocks suddenly. Shay halts, alarmed. It never knocks unless it's brewing trouble on the outside.

 

"Who's it?" Liam calls, calm, ever so. There knocks a second time, harder, sharp. Shay frowns. "Best not to open," he says, but puts his drink down, steadying himself, in advance of the chance of there happening something. He thinks that the last time either of them opened for a passing stranger, they'd nearly got shanked.

 

The door swings open, violently beneath the balance of a black boot, now suspended in mid-air. Its sole is frayed, and the arch of the belonging leg is elegant. Shay has already risen from the table, knocking his knees into its underside, hands flexing into fists.

 

A girl -- no, a woman, is it, comes through the door, dirty and with blood staining the freckled bridge of her nose. Her hair is a tangle of black and willow branches, and by Christ, Shay thinks, she is a beauty. Wild as the sea, if he ever saw a likening fair and terrifying enough to connect them two. She looks to Liam, completely disregarding Shay. "Busy?" she asks, though to Shay, it sounds pretty much too rhetorical for Liam to reply with anything but a nay.

 

"Good, you're coming with me then. And if he's got a decent right hook on him, you can bring your friend. He's got size, if nothing else." She sizes him up from his toes to his face, passive eyes, calculating. Shay says nothing, doesn't know what he were supposed to say even if the cat would've let him keep his tongue.

  

* * *

 

Achilles Davenport is a toughened man, leaned out like stretched meat, its fat wasted, its roughness perished. Shay wishes that he wouldn't tremble like the deer caught before the pistol muzzle when he meets the Mentor, but he does, because Achilles introduces himself with knives in his voice, and a blade strapped to his wrist. Shay doesn't catch its glimpse, but when Achilles meets his handshake, he feels the gauntlet click and dig into his own wrist.

 

"What do you do, child?" asks Achilles. Shay dares to glance at Liam, who stands tightlipped by the scene, with Hope -- Shay's learned, and a Native boy whose eyes are framed red, blackly studying him, whose name still avoids him. Liam nods. Barely a nick of the chin. "I do constructions," Shay replies, a mumble. Achilles hums, the sage of his tone begetting an unreadable expression turned to the others at the scene.

 

"He's proven with his fists and with a sword, though both would definitely need vast improvements to do in anything but the gutter," Hope says, hard, assessing. There's no emotion tangled in her words, and Shay is sometimes hard pressed to remember that she's barely more'n a teenager herself.

 

"Aye, Mentor, and he's clever too. Knows his way around knots and ropes, got the sea in his blood. We've always gotten through thick 'n thin, us together."

 

Shay looks to Liam, a brother in everything but blood, and then to the ground before Achilles, because he daren't look the man in the eye. He doesn't know what this means, truly, but when Liam had taken him aside after another errand ran with Hope, a courier package stranded on the docks that they were to pick and retrieve, he'd said with seldom light in his eyes and a conviction in his words that this was a _true home_ , and Shay had known then that it was true and that it was real.

 

"Are you willing to learn, Shay?" asks Achilles now. Shay nods, hard, into the ground, against the convicted tone that the Mentor displays.

 

* * *

 

Shay sleeps, and he dreams.

 

Lucid dreaming, dipped in a belladonna tincture, willow bark tea, and mellow opiates, which bring him simultaneous darkness and light. From his memories he drowns, over and over, a waste in the ocean, sinking, tossed about in the black waves squalling roaring in a storm. Above him is a typhoon, brought drown from the Southern Sea, a righteous flood. When he wakes, he is often alone, and it is difficult to discern whether he is on the ocean floor, or above sea level. When he dreams, he is barely human, prickly flesh stretching down his feet and across his knuckles, breath coming through razors in his throat, opening on the sides of his neck, easy as the flow of the water.

 

At one point, he hears a whisper come from the heavens, blue and lilac above him, and he thinks that, aboard the lurching _Fianna's_ deck, it is the voice of the God he has doubted many a times. It says no words that Shay, a mere boy, could fathom -- but it speaks in powerful hills and soothing slopes. It rocks the _Fianna_ , and then brings her back to breathe atop the waves.

 

It is almost enough to reach father. It is never just enough.

 

He gasps for air, between the waves and the boring of the cartridge into the bone of his shoulder blade, the pane cracking, pulverized beneath the pressure of the shot, blood a thick sludge dawning to the bottom of the ocean. Shay follows, obediently, dogmatist. Bending beneath either a set codex of rules or beneath a bullet. At the end of his dream, these two things become mirror, drawing from the other's syntax, a belief worth throwing your life to the wolves for.

 

It becomes a kaleidoscopic disaster -- Lisbon breaking apart entirely at its seams, splitting, rupturing, beneath a large triangular sigil weighing down upon it so heavy. 

 

His lungs push on their cradle in his ribcage, which has bent into a cavity following the pressure of keeping his breath for too long -- being put to bed on an ocean littered with skeletal remains and with the whisper of Liam's breath into Shay's skull. He pushes off the sand weightless, unable to breathe, and Liam is gone, and what remains are signs in Portuguese, stucco from the grand cathedrals -- a child's naked jaw. Shay wills himself to scream. He can't.

 

Then he wakes up.

 

* * *

 

Shay has been convinced enough when he meets Haytham. Persuasion is something he has sworn himself from ever succumbing to, again, but when the Grandmaster corners him out in the slanting sunlight of the late day, afterwards, Shay thinks that the silk and steel of his voice sways him just like he's caught in the flow of the tide. Haytham has an arrogant tilt to his smile, and a sharpness to him that is neither here nor there.

 

"I expect that you will not disappoint," Haytham says, and Shay wouldn't dare, to not.

 

"I don't plan to, Sir," he replies.

 

Haytham nods, decisive, and when he turns from Shay, there's a litheness to his step, a curl to the way he walks, which Shay has never seen on someone not part of the Brotherhood. Templars walk with swagger, a sway to their shoulders which exudes a brand of confidence that has always vastly differed from how Shay has viewed the world. He has looked in the springs of light which come when you part your fingers before your face, and Liam always told him that whenever he didn't cower, he walked brashly, ready to put a torch to a gasoline fuse. _"You can't be both," he'd laughed, and slapped a wiry arm down across the span of Shay's shoulders, tugging him along._

 

In the years under Achilles' mentorship, Shay shed the cowardice snakelike, and slithered into the light of moving efficiently, billowing, like the shadows. That is how Haytham walks out of the gardens, like he's eyes in the low of his neck, nomad like, acutely aware of where to strategically place your person to avoid the direct line of fire, rather than calling upon your personal cavalry. This is where Shay has seen his own malfunction, but now, it is splayed bare on the Grandmaster, and he isn't anymore -- certain, of the natural order of organization. _Perhaps I just en't meant to know_ , he thinks, and makes his path towards the docks, eventually.

 

Gist is waiting aboard, expectantly, along with the roused crew, whose unison voice forms a bellow of a greeting. Shay salutes them.

 

"A devoted crew, Captain," says the Grandmaster from farther down the _Morrigan's_ starboard. Shay masks his surprise to his words. "Sir," he greets, though they just only parted company. "Will you be sailing with us then, not on a -- private, vessel?"

 

Haytham's lip curls. "Now, I've heard that you're more capable than most. I'd like to experience such a fine sailor first hand, especially on a voyage that could prove to be vital to our campaign."

 

"Of course, Sir. I'll see to that the men put aside a private cabin for you to make use of."

 

"Captain." Haytham inclines his head, and turns from him, brushing past with barely more than a linger of scent and the whip of the Grandmaster's clothing, caught astray in the wind.

 

* * *

 

A storm doesn't leave without reaping a few victims. It does not go silently without first breaking open the bend of planks making up the hull of a ship. Shay knows this.

 

He doesn't hesitate, bracketing Hope's body between his knees, to push the hidden blade into her breast. But if he were to dwell on the physicality of the chase, and the end -- long after it is done, then he would remember it as slicing open his own heart, holding it bloody and beating wildly in the cage of his own fingers. Her breathing is shallow, and rattles, and she chuckles weakly, when Shay twists over her; crouching on his knees by her side.

 

"You had such potential," she murmurs, and in the clasp of his hand, where he isn't holding his heart, she slips her fingers, though the two things may just be cut from the same cloth. Her gloved hand is slick with rain and waste, and she holds it to his cheek, where he can feel the dull jackrabbit thump of her pulse slow.

 

"Hope," he whispers, and lets go.

 

That night, he stumbles back to the _Morrigan's_ deck, slipping past those of his men up with the moon, and sleeps, dreaming, until the breaking of the sun on the horizon. His dreams are restless, throwing him about, impaling him on wood, beating against the case of his skull. He sleeps in fits, until the dewy morning light comes about, though that isn't what awakens him, sleeping in the darkened belly of his ship. It is a hand which jolts him awake, a voice, bringing him forth. "Captain Cormac!"

 

Shay vaults up, defenses all but torn completely, Hope's final ashen stutters tasting like burial earth in his throat. Haytham's plainly clothed figure comes into blurry vision, and Shay has to breathe, deeply, _that's it, Shay, rock through it_ , comes a soothing murmur in the back of his head, a brotherly cradle. He shakes his head, attempting to shake any lingering demons from his waking mind. "My apologies, Master Kenway," he stutters, warmth licking beneath his jaw in shame and surprise.

 

Haytham, despite outward appearances, which is an askew linen shirt and rumpled breeches, boots bunching the fabric halfway up his shins, looks unperturbed. "We are but men," the Grandmaster says, sagely, and lets his hand drop, to come to rest in the low of his back, knotted. "Some of us carry a heavier burden than others. It is partly what makes me so certain of your qualities, Shay."

 

Shay twists his hips to come and rest on the edge of his mattress, his feet finding steady shelter on the gently rocking floor. He wipes the sheen of chilling sweat from his forehead, down to the bridge of his nose. "I wouldn't expect so much, Sir. Expectations often come crashing down, sooner or later, you see."

 

Haytham's turned back is arched above a lantern and a flask of oil, and he is attempting to ignite a spark in the damp dark. "I abhor humbleness that turns into self-doubt, as much as I do assuredness, which turns into arrogance," he says, and kindles the flame. "It is in the fine lines, and in the fine prints, that true secrets are hidden."

 

Shay chuckles. "You truly're something, Master Kenway. Got any fine print to your name? Sonnets to a beloved one, far from the colonies?"

 

Haytham turns slowly on a heel, a dime beneath the pressure of his boot. His left eyebrow is perfectly raised. "Arrogance, compliancy, insolence," he counts, as if checking from a list.

 

Shay grins. "Eh, let's hope I'm not on that list next then."

 

Haytham stays the conversation, just momentarily, a relief in the weather. The corner of his lip curls, slowly, pleasantly. It coils something taught within Shay. "Indeed, Captain Cormac. Let us hope indeed not."

 

* * *

 

It is, unsurprisingly, Shay's storm, raging beneath his skin, that brings him flush to Haytham in ways that curls in his gut like red hot iron.

 

He dreams very often of the physical aspect of being soothed from his terrors. The way Liam used to be an older, toughened out shoulder; kin. He wakes Shay from his fitful slumber, barely slumber as much as it is a barely not asleep state of unconsciousness. He is never asleep, truly, because in the mornings his eyes are rimmed and beneath them are bruises.

 

_"Hey, Shay -- Sshh, come here," lulls him to slow, pained consciousness. Liam is a dark shape in the muddy light, which nods with vigor. "Yeah, up you come, we're just gonna be taking a walk 'round the premise, aye?"_

_Liam supports him on an arm around his waist, still thin and not quite healed from the wrecking of the Fianna. "You're okay, Shay," he murmurs, and leads Shay forward, out of the room, which ceases to close around him, its walls staying, for now._

 

It becomes a bi-nightly occurrence for Haytham to take up the vast desk in his cabin, spreading a variety of quills and a hefty bottle of ink down to lay before the sheafs of parchment he writes on. Shay had protested, but the Grandmaster keeps odd waking hours, and, honestly, Shay lays off his boss after a while. Much the same as Liam had acted as a heavy anchor to bring him down in their young days, Haytham provides a soothing scribble across paper with the sharp tip of his quill, the Grandmaster's measured breathing baying Shay in the shuttering of his own eyelids and feeling only the murmuring peace of his own beating heart. Not the anxiety of those whose hearts no longer beat.

 

But it is folly and naïvety to believe that for a human presence, his demons scatter astray.

 

Shay wakes from dragging his fingertips across the wet walls of a mausoleum, brimming with momento of people he has known, from a stroke of knuckles crossing the side of his neck, turning over and over, feeling his in-flight pulse harshly. His heart is a drum, a frightened animal, and above him, when he tears open his eyes, sucking after breath that is too large for his little lungs, Haytham's face is hard set.

 

"Sir --" Shay gasps, his tongue clumsy, heavy. Haytham frowns, the dip in his brow deepening. "Shay," he murmurs, at once a question and a statement. Shay nods, and raises a hand to palm away wet hair from his forehead. His fingers tremble, and he notices that Haytham is still stroking the flutter of his pulse, the skin burning, slowly. His stomach knots, unknots -- his thoughts are wild. Primal.

 

"Shay," Haytham murmurs, once more, and twists his hand, to lay his palm flat against the juncture joining the plane of his shoulder with the slope of his neck. It still aches, sore, traveling from the scar on his outside to the scar on his inside. He looks up into Haytham's dark eyes, and sees himself, almost. He breathes through his mouth. "Haytham," he says, low, and feels how it sets him afire, slowly, a cold burn, an iron brand.

 

Haytham plays by his own set of rules, coming down in a rush to lick, painstakingly, into Shay's mouth. He is still standing, motionless save for the teeth on Shay's bottom lip, the fingers digging into Shay's shoulder, squeezing rhythmics into his muscle tissue. Shay groans, breaking it, and claws at Haytham's shirt, tugging him forward, into himself. The Grandmaster does not fall, and for all of Shay's skittering heart and collapsed thoughts, the origin of his impulses deep in his bones, rather than in his brain -- he smiles, half, at the compose Haytham exudes, even as this.

 

"'M not so sure this is entirely appropriate, _Grandmaster_ ," Shay breathes, tangling in Haytham's hair, nose pressing into his jaw. Haytham's breath hitches. Just the hint. "Given the situation, or given our stations, _Captain_?" Haytham replies, and trails a hand down to anchor on Shay's hip. Shay laughs, low, and it does nothing to stop the onslaught of arousal which makes him finally heave Haytham over; the Grandmaster coming down still with relative grace, to brace himself on his forearms, just above Shay. He raises an eyebrow.

 

"Seems to me like _your_ station's the one causing most trouble right now," Shay says, and moves his hands to grip on Haytham's sides; anywhere where they will cease trembling. "Don't go about so high strung, Sir. You'll wind up like meself, one less than fine day."

 

Haytham doesn't reply immediately, with either touch or word, but studies Shay from his vantage point. Shay feels his own pulse throughout his entire body, throbbing, and the fact that he's already leaking, entirely voided from where this situation stemmed from, earlier in the night. He reaches down from where he's held on to Haytham, and covers the straining front of his loose breeches with one hand, jolting slightly, from the feel of his fingers wrapping around himself. Haytham's breath stocks, very quietly. It is the hunt -- the pounce. Seconds hang between them for a few errant heartbeats. Shay counts them, one, two, three. He tugs at his own cock, slicking up in his underwear, and groans.

 

Haytham growls, and, in a stroke of agility that should've left the best of Shay's occasionally bendy companions in the wake, he rolls his hips down onto Shay, the low of his back arching, then coming down. The Grandmaster looks hard pressed to as much as trouble himself with Shay's wondrous groan, and bows his head aggressively, to bite around the fan of a collarbone. "Jesus, boss," Shay mutters, and grinds upwards, onto his hand and into Haytham, who is, by the feel of it, just as hard as he is.

 

Shay rides the nerves, frayed endings, remnants of nightmares, and reveres when Haytham manages to hatch both their breeches down around their knees, somewhere, to tangle. He makes deft work of Shay's attention being elsewhere than on the Grandmaster's fingers -- and by all the deities that Shay has ever blasphemed to; Haytham sucks blood into his bottom lip and thrusts harshly down into Shay's cock, smeared and leaking profusely, and he mutters incoherencies and recites half the prominent characters of _a_ _n Rúraíocht_  into Haytham's breastbone.

 

The Grandmaster reaches between them to twist his wrist just _so_ , splaying his palm over the entirety of Shay, working his hand in deft, hard strokes, fingers pitterpatting a rhythm along his shaft contrasting to the harsh jerks. It tugs his gut out, leaving him on display, and Shay _can't_ \-- he gasps, breath slipping in bursts, desperate, as he comes, white noise building in his vision and in his stomach, and he senses barely through how Haytham swears violence, and bucks against Shay's slippery abdomen one final time before he also shudders out release.

 

* * *

 

The Arctic is desolate, blue with ice and white with the Earth rounding on itself, endless in this very place. Shay has come full circle with his nightmares, and the anxiety in his breast is overshadowed only by the prominence of how he feels justification. It will break him, crack him open, when he catches up to Liam now. But he knows that below his feet, there is a vast ocean which will not come rushing down upon them in imbalance. If he dies today, then he is content. If he dies with Liam -- then they will walk into the life after this one, steadied on one other's shoulder.

 

Full circle.

 

The wind is curling in his marrow and in his bones, and far away, he hears Haytham and Achilles.

 

Liam is just ahead, coming up the slope towards the jut of a cliff brokered in molten, shimmering blue. Shay knows that if he were to approximate the seconds it would take to halt, raise one of the two twin pistols, and shoot, then he would have plenty of time to aim for Liam's vertebrae. To make sure that his intended bullet does not deviate from where the impact would be the most devastating. But he can't -- there's a bend in the physics controlling the very earth which twists askew now. Shay runs, pulsing through powdered layers of snow, and throws himself towards Liam, but he can't --

 

It's too late, and it always is, as they tumble over the edge. Shay feels his neck snap backwards from the fall, and he is enveloped, for the second, in the lapping of gentle waves. He can hear the rush of water somewhere, not far, just in his vicinity, and the rush of air, the cold. He imagines them walking away from this. Liam clasping his hand, enveloping Shay in the shield of his larger body. They're brothers.

 

He breaks a handful of ribs, dislocates a shoulder, and twists his right knee. It doesn't compare to smelling the splay of blood beneath Liam, before he manages to roll over, and see it spread thickly around him like the parting of the red flood for his person. Liam coughs a mouthful of it, and spits, leaving a trail of softly pink saliva trailing down the corner of his mouth. He laughs, crooked, broken open. He mirrors physically what Shay feels. Perhaps it is just the way they are.

 

"That was -- lucky," Liam breathes.

 

Shay understands that luck only comes after paying its price. A toll is expected, to gain entrance, to glimpse fortune. Shay has paid it too many a times already, and he remains alive, knowing that it never returns. He struggles for breath through the bend of snapped ribs, leaning into one lung. "How many times do I have to tell you, Liam -- I make my own luck."

 

It just means that Shay has discarded his toll fee into a small pile by the crossroad, to later have it shoved back at his feet, empty coins of painted chrome. You cannot win luck. Liam's breath rattles wetly. He coughs. Shay feels his gut twist itself into a million knots, and he can taste salt water and ashes, a wily oak rooting in his stomach, growing through his breast, and out of his mouth. It is pain, and had he known how to remove that equation from his life, he would have. Because Liam is dying. _Liam_.

 

"I hope your world's a good one."

 

The tide washes him away, eventually. A storm does not come and go without reaping victims in its wake. Shay wonders when it will be him.

 

* * *

 

Gist and the men say nothing, when Haytham pushes Shay before him back onto the _Morrigan's_ deck. The Arctic is desolate, blue with ice and water and white with pain. The Grandmaster supports him, on a shoulder larger than Shay's own, chorded, and they stagger slowly into the captain's cabin.

 

"Can you breathe, Shay?" Haytham asks, low, intent, and helps him down onto the makeshift mattress. Shay nods. "Aye, for now." He doesn't mention the searing pain in his muscle, in his blood -- the struggle for air is mental, more than it is the result of physical damage. Shay runs on opiates, adrenaline, and the surge hasn't worn off.

 

When it does, it is long since evening, and the milky moon waves in and out of the squalls the _Morrigan_ makes upon the ocean, ghostly. Shay leans on her for support. Haytham does not initiate conversation. Shay has to.

 

"You will retrieve the Box for the Templar Order -- and for me."

 

Beneath the moon, Shay nods, and sheds the person he is, right now, for this mission. Snakelike. He is a stray collected, he is a stray collection of pieces, put together. The _Fienna_. Haiti. Lisbon. Hope. Liam. Somewhere, along the dwindle of the road, he dreams, that he will not be the one left in this world whilst ghosts collect like a swarm of long forgotten mistakes around his person.

 

* * *

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> this was going to be light hearted and my first attempt at handling shay's -- and haytham's, voices. and instead it just got depressing. what the hell, self. seriously though, shay went through some serious shit, and to imagine that he doesn't carry at least part of that baggage throughout his entire life seems kind of, idk, unreal? so this happened. it's really rough, basically un-edited, not to mention severely affected by shaytham _feels_.


End file.
